Phoning

Today I made ten phone calls. That's a lot for one day, at least for me. I'm not too fond of phoning people. I'd much rather just talk face to face with the people I know. As for people I don't know, I'd usually rather not talk to them at all (eg. people calling to do a random over-the-phone survey).

Until I took Advanced Reporting last semester, I relied on either e-mailing my sources to make appointments or just going to see them in the hope that they could take a few minutes to talk with me. That method worked all right for News Reporting when almost all of my stories were on campus. It didn't work so well in Advanced Reporting. My news beat in that class was the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library. It just wasn't logical to drive downtown to the main branch whenever I had a story due and the closer branches didn't always have the information I needed to know. Finally I realized calling my sources over the phone was a pretty efficient way to get information from them. Plus, I quickly learned that taking notes in a phone interview is a whole lot easier and way faster than writing them all out in a face-to-face interview.

I still am not a huge fan of the phone, but being able to effectively use it was an asset today. Of the ten calls I made, nine were to writers (the other was accidental). Three of those nine gave me the results I wanted. None of the e-mails I sent to those same contacts even got answered.